17-years-old

My friend Ulli and I went to the Seelow Heights, right on the current border to Poland, on Sunday. We started at the museum there, built during the East German regime. 300,000 visitors from Russia have made a pilgrimage here since it opened, to view the massive Russian soldier statue, graveyard, and the various memorials scattered throughout the region. But where were the German soldiers?

We drove down into the plain where soldiers on both sides lost their lives in vast numbers. Driving from small village to village, we occasionally *felt* them as we looked for the German war dead cemeteries. I knew something had happened at a field when not only the hair on my arms stood on end, but I also got goosebumps down my legs all the way to my ankles. I wasn’t the only one. Ulli, who is actually far more sensitive than me, so much so that he helps people professionally this way, asked me to stop so he could open up to the energy of very, very young soldiers, lost and wondering how to move on. As he worked with them I actually felt their presence get stronger and really oppressive, so much so that I started crying from the pain and sorrow. Then it slowly ebbed and eased. We both had to wipe away tears before we could move on.

But where were the graves of these young men, boys really? We couldn’t easily find them. At a small village we found a Russian memorial and graves. We asked some young people where the German war dead were, they didn’t know. The middle-aged couple thought we wanted the Russians. It wasn’t until we found a 90-year-old pastor that he was able to direct us to the almost completely hidden mass grave in the village cemetery.

Even once in the cemetery we had to ask the caretaker to direct us. He wasn’t quite sure what we wanted. Who comes to visit these men and boys? Asking for the Germans caused puzzlement and confusion.  They, like the British in Becklingen, obviously receive few visitors. There in the back, hidden by trees and bushes, they lay together, unidentified, but together as comrades in death as they fought in the last moments of their lives.

We quietly thought of the children and old men who were forced to lay their lives down here. Then we visited more small village cemeteries where space had quietly been made for the copious unidentified German soldiers who were never accorded a proper military burial or resting place, even on their own soil.

Finally, we found a quiet military field cemetery on a hill overlooking some meadows. There are no regular stone markers here, no carefully tended grass. Only dirt, pine trees, and white metal signs adorn the graves. The first sign I saw was a boy who died the day before his 18th birthday. I could so very vividly remember my 18th birthday.  I was at college, far away from home, lonely and homesick for my family.  I imagine he was probably missing his family too.

Do you remember what you did on your 18th birthday? Can you imagine bleeding to death, knowing you were never going to make it to tomorrow, and your parents would most likely never know if, where, when and how you had died?

Even now two hundred new graves are added each year as the bodies of these boys and men are found on the fields and woods, 66 years later. Many families never knew what happened to their sons, brothers, husbands, or fathers. Did they die in battle, or were they taken prisoner to Russia to die in slave labor there? Many women had to eventually declare their husbands dead so that they could receive widow’s benefits to help keep their children alive. Some remarried, only to have their original husband return after five or ten years in Russian captivity. It was an agonizing time for nearly every family. I can’t imagine what it would be like to never know what happened. And now the boys who are found and identified…their families are mostly or all dead.

Have you hugged a World War Two veteran lately? It’d be a wonderful way to show you love them, no matter which side your country or they were on.